He stubbornly stayed at this thought. He liked this solution more than any other. He began studying her with greater attention.

“So you pray very much to God, Sonya?” he asked her.

Sonya was silent; he stood beside her, waiting for an answer.

“And what would I be without God?” she whispered quickly, energetically, glancing at him fleetingly with suddenly flashing eyes, and she pressed his hand firmly with her own.

“So that's it!” he thought.

“And what does God do for you in return?” he asked, testing her further.

Sonya was silent for a long time, as if she were unable to answer. Her frail chest was all heaving with agitation . . .

“Be still! Don't ask! You're not worthy! . . .” she cried suddenly, looking at him sternly and wrathfully.

“That's it! That's it!” he repeated insistently to himself.

“He does everything!” she whispered quickly, looking down again.

“Here's the solution! Here's the explanation of the solution!” he decided to himself, studying her with greedy curiosity.

With a new, strange, almost painful feeling, he peered at that pale, thin, irregular, and angular little face, those meek blue eyes, capable of flashing with such fire, such severe, energetic feeling, that small body still trembling with indignation and wrath, and it all seemed more and more strange to him, almost impossible. “A holy fool! A holy fool!” he kept saying within himself.^[95]

There was a book lying on the chest of drawers. He had noticed it each time he paced the room; now he picked it up and looked. It was the New Testament, in Russian translation.^[96] The book was old, used, bound in leather.

“Where did this come from?” he called to her across the room. She was still standing in the same place, three steps from the table.

“It was brought to me,” she answered, as if reluctantly, and without glancing at him.

“Who brought it?”

“Lizaveta. I asked her to.”

“Lizaveta! How strange!” he thought. Everything about Sonya was becoming more strange and wondrous for him with each passing minute. He took the book over to the candle and began leafing through it.

“Where is the part about Lazarus?” he asked suddenly.

Sonya went on stubbornly looking down, and did not answer.

“Where is it about the raising of Lazarus? Find it for me, Sonya.”

She gave him a sidelong glance.

“You're looking in the wrong place...it's in the fourth Gospel...” she whispered sternly, without moving towards him.

“Find it and read it to me,” he said. He sat down, leaned his elbow on the table, propped his head in his hand, and looked away sullenly, preparing to listen.

“About three weeks, and welcome to Bedlam! I'll probably be there myself, if nothing worse happens,” he muttered to himself.

Sonya stepped hesitantly to the table, mistrusting Raskolnikov's strange wish. Nevertheless, she picked up the book.

“You've never read it?” she asked, glancing at him loweringly across the table. Her voice was becoming more and more severe.

“Long ago...in school. Read it!”

“You never heard it in church?”

“I...haven't gone. Do you go often?”

“N-no,” whispered Sonya.

Raskolnikov grinned.

“I see...Then you won't go tomorrow to bury your father either?”

“Yes, I will. And I went last week...for a memorial service.”

“For whom?”

“Lizaveta. She was killed with an axe.”

His nerves were becoming more and more irritated. His head was beginning to spin.

“Were you friends with Lizaveta?”

“Yes...She was a just woman...She came...rarely...she couldn't. She and I used to read and...talk. She will see God.”^[97]

How strange these bookish words sounded to him; and here was another new thing: some sort of mysterious get-togethers with Lizaveta—two holy fools.

“One might well become a holy fool oneself here! It's catching!” he thought. “Read!” he suddenly exclaimed insistently and irritably.

Sonya still hesitated. Her heart was pounding. She somehow did not dare read to him. He looked almost with pain at the “unfortunate madwoman.”

“What is it to you? You don't believe, do you? . . .” she whispered softly, somehow short of breath.

“Read! I want you to!” he insisted. “You read to Lizaveta!”

Sonya opened the book and found the place. Her hands were trembling; she did not have voice enough. She tried twice to begin, but kept failing to get the first syllable out.

“‘Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany . . .' “^[98] she uttered at last, with effort, but suddenly, at the third word, her voice rose and broke like an overtightened string. Her breath failed, and her chest contracted.

Raskolnikov partly understood why Sonya was hesitant to read to him, and the more he understood it, the more rudely and irritably he insisted on her reading. He understood only too well how hard it was for her now to betray and expose all that was hers. He understood that these feelings might indeed constitute her secret, as it were, real and long-standing, going back perhaps to her adolescence, when she was still in the family, with her unfortunate father and her grief-maddened stepmother, among the hungry children, the ugly shouts and reproaches. But at the same time he now knew, and knew for certain, that even though she was anguished and terribly afraid of something as she was starting out to read, she also had a tormenting desire to read, in spite of all her anguish and apprehension, and precisely for him, so that he would hear it, and precisely now—”whatever might come of it afterwards!”...He read it in her eyes, understood it from her rapturous excitement...She mastered herself, suppressed the spasm in her throat that had made her voice break at the beginning of the verse, and continued her reading of the eleventh chapter of John's Gospel. Thus she read on to the nineteenth verse:

“‘And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary, to comfort them concerning their brother. Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him: but Mary sat still in the house. Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee.’”

Here she stopped again, anticipating with shame that her voice was again about to tremble and break . . .

“‘Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? She saith unto him . . .’”

(and catching her breath as if in pain, Sonya read strongly and distinctly, exactly as if she herself were confessing it for all to hear:)

“‘Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.’”

She stopped, quickly raised her eyes to him, but mastered herself at once and began to read further. Raskolnikov sat listening motionlessly, without turning, his elbow resting on the table, his eyes looking away.

They read to the thirty-second verse.

“‘Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him! And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died?’”